by Neil Clarke
“In the name of the father!” the mouth shouted, and I backed away so fast I fell right on my tail. I was scrambling away using my stupid metal leg and my stumpy wings, and not getting very far at all, when the gnome pieces began to rise. I don’t know how they did it, since even if they were still imbued with spirit, most of the chunks had no physical way of moving, but they came together into a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of pottery. Maybe it really was god’s will.
Before I knew it there were many of them, surrounding me. I had nothing to use as a weapon, nowhere to run. I couldn’t even get up on my foot, as it were.
I wish I could say the last thing I remember was the gnome’s club coming toward my head, the beast’s self-righteous, seamed grimace. But I remember the whole thing. I had no brain to concuss, no lights to go out. And whatever was creating my consciousness, it wasn’t going to let me off that easily.
On the other hand, it didn’t really hurt either, with no nerves. The first blow squished my head, and I guess it must have wiped the paint off my right eye, because after that I couldn’t see out of it. The gnome pounded me until I felt as flat as roadkill. And all the while, out of my left eye, I watched friends shatter.
Some time after the gnomes left I picked myself up and looked around. It wasn’t easy. The gnomes had pulled out my metal leg and used it to skewer Rocky. They’d also dented me all over, and part of my neck was so thin that the weight of my plastic head made it droop.
But I saw right away that I was the only one left. The others had been brittle; they had broken. Rocky the teddy bear had gone the way of Rowan. I couldn’t see the plastic half barn owl at all.
The worst part was the secret the gnomes had taught me: the fact of eternal life. It horrified me to think that the shards of my friends might still have consciousness, trapped in whatever powerless form they had left. The thought of Irma tormented me. She’d been melted into a shapeless blob of plastic with no eyes, no ears, no limbs, no mouth to scream. And then I’d buried her.
The gnomes’ behavior didn’t make any sense, in light of their ability to re-form and keep on going. If they knew that these forms we now inhabited were deathless, then why had they tried to kill us? I could only hope that they really had been divinely animated, and that my friends and family wouldn’t be. But in order to believe in that I had to believe in god, and those days were long, long behind me.
It took me a damn long time, broken as I was. First I had to gather the things I’d need, and they were hard to find in the wasteland the property had become. Then I needed to dig up my Irma. The gnome’s shovel was still where we’d dropped it, but it was hell to wield it without any hands. In the end I gave up and dug with my pathetic wings, one scraping millimeter at a time. But what did I have but time? I didn’t need to stop for food or sleep; I didn’t have muscles to fatigue. So I didn’t rest until I’d uncovered my love.
She was at the bottom of a shallow hole, a dingy pink puddle of plastic with two metal legs still sticking out at odd angles. God, I hoped she wasn’t in there. But if she was, it was where I wanted to be. I dropped my own mangled body on top of hers, then doused us both with the little bottle of lighter fluid I’d found.
“I’m coming, Irma,” I said.
And then I lit a match.
Driftings
Ian McDonald
A hat, a deer and a plastic truck came in on the swell of the ocean. The hat was a yellow hard-hat; an engineer’s, a construction worker’s hat. Its foam inserts had buoyed it across wide waters. The deer was a Puchie Baby miniature with a skull-and-crossbones patterned hide. Adorable, small. The truck was really a tiger-design kid’s trunki, but the wheels still turned, after so long in the gyre.
The truck was the last one, the difficult one. Picking his way along the shore, squinting at the bright steel horizon, he had glimpsed an ear of color between gray of sky and gray of sea. Squint. An edge of sea-scabbed orange, lolling in the lap. He splashed out into the waves. The cold cut through the steamer suit and he was chilled already from the fight to rescue the hard hat. The current could show you a thing and take it back into the gyre. It had teased him with the hard hat, luring him, then pulling it away, drawing him deeper than he wanted to go. The current that took a hat out to the gyre could take a man, even a fit, strong young man like Reith. A lunge, a splash, and it was his. He waded up out of the surf-line, the yellow, oil-scabbed hat on his head.
In the clear water he saw geometry beneath the triangle of orange plastic and guessed what lay low in the swell. Here was a kid’s ride-on luggage trunk, a tiger-face still discernible. Thigh-deep, waist-deep. His. He towed it to shore.
The girl sat on a mound at the edge of the foot-worn path to the road. Her knees were pulled close to her body, her arms wrapped around her shins. Reith peered to see if she was watching him drag the kiddie-trunk along the beach, salt water trickling from its seam.
She was watching him. He was the only watchable thing.
Her sleeves were pulled down over the backs of her hands. They were her sole concession to the weather. Low gray clouds streamed in from the ocean and caught on the tops of the trees, unfurling thin drizzle. The cloud could sit like that for weeks. A thin print dress and a cardigan were not clothes for this shore.
He wanted to open the plastic trunk there and then, at his bivouac, but he could feel the girl’s eyes on him. He didn’t want her to see him greedy and excited, forcing the catch, spilling out the salt-spoiled treasures he hoped were inside. You work uneasily when the only eyes for miles are on you. He packed up the bivouac, pulled the hoodie on over the wetsuit, loaded the sea-things into a plastic box.
“What makes you take them?” The girl’s voice was soft but carrying.
“Feeling there’s a loss in it,” Reith said. “Feeling there’s a story and a hurt.”
Japanese, not Chinese, Reith reckoned. Skin so smooth; hair falling to the small of her back, hair-product straight and shiny. Ocean cold was beginning to infiltrate the wetsuit but the slump of a wave, the side-slip of a gull on the air, the sudden hiss of eddying drizzle; all said stay, speak.
“Aren’t you cold?”
“I don’t really get cold. But it would be worth it. I love it here.”
Reith looked to the pull-in among the trees. His pickup was the only vehicle.
“How did you get here?”
“I got dropped off.”
“You will get cold. It’s not good. I can give you a ride back to town, if that’s where you’re at.”
“They’ll pick me up again.”
Reith knew she was not telling the truth but you can’t call someone on that in the ninth sentence you exchange with them. The girl knew that he knew because she combed her hair back behind her ear and smiled.
“I’ll be fine. Really.” Mist lay in minute silver pearls on the fibers of her woolen cardigan but did not cling to her hair or skin at all.
So she was in town. Reith liked that. They might meet again, by chance or by design.
He looked back from the door of the pickup. She was still there, on the edge of drop from the tree-line down to the driftwood. Again he looked, as he turned back on to the highway. He half expected her to have vanished. She was still there, gray on gray. He turned the heater up full to blow some warmth back into his legs.
A fleece-fiber scarf. A bucket of plastic zoo-animals. A drinks cup with spout. A sea-rotted cardboard picture book. A child’s things.
Driving in the pickup he saw her walking on the side of the road. She moved lightly, barely connected to the earth at all. The same light print dress and cardigan. The clouds were lower today, catching on the flagpole outside the junior school and the eccentric carpentered spires and shingles of the old wooden hotel where Roosevelt was supposed to have stayed. You could reach up and grab a fistful of rain. He turned in the road and drove beside her.
“Hi.”
“Oh. Hi.”
“I’m, uh, thinking about grabbing a coffee. Can I get you one
?”
She scraped her hair behind an ear. She smiled by not quite looking at him.
“That would be good.”
“Do you want a ride?”
“Is it far?”
“No, just across from the old Roosevelt hotel.”
“I know that. I’ll walk.”
She had arrived by the time he had turned the car across the traffic.
“You’re not in the wetsuit today.”
“I will be later.” It was in the back of the truck, with the bivouac and the rest of the beach-combing equipment. The same westerly driving the raft of cloud could also push the entire gyre, hundreds of miles across, closer to the coast. Westerlies were good foraging winds.
“I like guys in wetsuits. They make them look vulnerable. Cute.”
Reith blinked and hid his blush in a sip of coffee. Retched. Spat.
“Jesus.”
“Are you okay?”
“Sorry. Salt. I must have put salt in instead of sugar.”
“There is no salt on the table.”
She tipped white crystals into the palm of her hand, dipped a lip-moistened finger, offered it to Reith to lick. Reith drew back.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” She licked her finger. “Yes, sweet.”
“You asked yesterday, at the beach, what made me take them,” Reith said. The lick of sugar from her finger had roused him. “Come and see.”
Again she dipped her head and looked away to hide a smile.
“I’d love to, thank you.”
Why had he offered to show her the Driftings? The westerly was blowing, the gyre was turning. He should be ten miles down the coast, scanning the break line with binoculars. Not offering to show her the studio; not stopping in the street to invite her to coffee, salt coffee.
Life and work were a foreclosed house a mile and a half up on the forest road. The agency had been only too happy to let it long term, cheap. They had no prospect of ever selling it on. Roosevelt had been the last big thing to happen in the town and it was now in the terminal stages of a century-long decline. The council had hoped to catch the dark wave of the Twilight business but had dithered too long and missed its crest. Bella’s coffee-shop had closed two months ago. Its coffee had been horrible. Reith reckoned he would need another house soon. The Driftings were forcing him back, like a whelk withdrawing into its shell, into smaller and smaller rooms. The Realtors were only too eager.
“It’s kind of cluttered in here.”
As the girl went past him into the house, Reith caught a sudden smell of the shore; rotting weed and sun-crisp crab, salt and sand-scab, so strong he almost gagged. For a moment, a breath; then he smelled her: clean skin, fabric conditioner, hair conditioner, something lightly floral.
The Ningyo Drifting occupied all of the main room apart from a narrow passage to the kitchen area.
The Ningyo Drifting: dolls, toys, transforming robots, toy cars, plastic zoo animals, those perverse vinyl figurines that have no other purpose than to be collectible by adults, toy soldiers, anime action figures, monsters and dinosaurs. Over four hundred of them now. The Puchie Baby deer would likely join them. Welded and melded, dismembered and re-membered, heads growing from alien torsos, from other heads, from shoulder stumps, multiple faces grafted on to a single head, like a Hindu deity; thickets of arms; transplanted legs; robot heads on toy dog bodies; all joined together into a coral tree.
The girl looked up at the branches of warped toys reaching over her head. Her mouth opened a little.
“This was my first piece. It’s the one I’ve been working at longest as well. I think maybe it won’t ever be finished. I certainly won’t ever sell it.” Reith touched a Kokeshi at the junction of two spreading antlers. “This was the first one. I was out on the peninsula with friends and picked it up at Taylor Point. Someone said it was Japanese, that there was a huge slick of stuff all sucked out to sea after the tsunami and it was moving slowly towards the west coast. The day after that the bit of dock washed up in Oregon. That kind of started it. No, I don’t think I’ll ever sell this one.”
Reith hadn’t eaten in the kitchen for months. He didn’t like having food around the ocean-things. Oils and hydrocarbons, tars and wastes. The whole house might be a little radioactive. He didn’t want to think about that. The kitchen had become the work room until it clogged up with beach-combings. The floor was filled to work-top height with ideas in progress. There was no room for feet, but it gave the best perspective on the Kanagawa Driftings in the dining area.
Things that open, built into a pastiche The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Bento boxes opening out of snap-fit kitchen containers opening out handbags opening out of lunch boxes out of plastic storage boxes out of rolling luggage out of fishing crates. Color-coordinated to recreate the deep wave blue and the breaker white of the Hokusai print. Reith would fit the trunki here, with thought. He had removed the ceiling light to accommodate the uppermost fractals of the plastic wave.
“Don’t you think it’s kind of . . . wrong?” the girl said. “I mean a wave made out of tsunami stuff?”
“There’s no fishing boat,” Reith said. “That would be wrong. But it’s not about the wave, or the tsunami. Really. It’s about how we see when we look across the ocean to Japan, how we fetishize it, how we import kawaii, or cosplay, and turn them into our own thing without ever trying to understand them.”
“I’m not sure I can always understand you,” the girl said. Her fingers felt out the nested links of plastic containers. “What was inside?”
“Most of them, nothing. The gyre grinds a lot of it up.”
“But something, sometimes.”
“Sometimes.”
A fleece-fiber scarf. A bucket of plastic zoo-animals. A drinks cup with spout. A sea-rotted cardboard picture book.
“It’s the inside things that have the story and the hurt,” the girl said. “Put-away things are loved things.”
The Kanagawa Drifting rattled as a rig, heavy with long lumber, passed down from the high forests.
The clouds had dipped lower when he came back from town, ragged handkerchiefs sliding through the trees. Spills and spoils from the moiling cloud base. She had wanted to be left where he found her, outside the Axel’s Coffee Place. He was past the intersection on the forest road when Reith remembered that he had not remembered, or had never asked, her name. By the time he was on to the forest road he was driving through cloud.
Death town. Dying slowly and inelegantly. Urban senility. Gray sky gray sea gray people. Every mile he had driven west from the ferry, drawn by the haunt of plastic detritus of apocalypse, he felt the gray settling heavier from him, smothering every energetic or creative thought. His first few weeks—thirty, twenty, however many dollars he could afford a night in the Roosevelt hotel; the obese Hunter day-trading in the back office; sure there’s a shared bathroom but no one’s had to share it in five years—he had to physically drag himself out of sleep and run up and down the corridor to the bathroom a dozen times to Wake! Up! Every creative thought was trawled from pelagic deeps. Baked-good breakfasts in Axel’s Coffee Place; brown-food dinners in the sports bar. Things hauled from the cold north-west sea, tsunami-things, piling up under the tarpaulin in the back of the pickup. Days of deep gray lull. Notion by notion, ideas emerged from the fog of apathy.
Reith started out of a doze at the flash of lights, followed moments later by the blast of the logging truck, passing at speed. He had been drifting across the line. Many of the truckers scorned headlights in the fog and constantly blared their titanic air horns. The fog was so dense he could hardly see the road markings. A sudden, intense smell of sea, salt, weed invaded the pickup through the air vents. Reith snapped them shut. The fog left white streaks on his windshield, gritty smears flecked with tiny white crystals. The wiper blades squeaked.
At the house he could taste salt on his tongue, ionic, iodine taste of salt, feel its sting on his lips, its astringency on his face. In the few steps it took to reach the porch his hair
, skin, clothes were briny as if he had stepped out of the sea. The air was heavy with sea-smell. Reith blinked salt mist out of his stinging eyes.
Shower. Reith could feel the grit of salt against his scalp. He stood a long time under the run of hot water, trying to scrub the sea from his skin. Salt fog.
In the morning the cloud had lifted but windows, porch, yard, car were freckled with salt-specks, a million tiny crystal sparkles.
A baked-goods breakfast in the Axel’s before heading down to Ruby Beach. A good day’s beach-combing. Like the early days. That would be the thing. Axel’s Coffee Place had changed hands, sold candles, had a book-swap scheme, free Wi-Fi, occasional tarot readings and singer-songwriter nights but all such regime changes were temporary in this town. Their Danish were good, their pain au chocolat too doughy.
“What about that fog?” Lauren said as she brought Reith a refill. “It like completely rusted up the locks. Just one night. Insania.”
“The girl.”
“The one you were in with yesterday?”
“What do you know about her?”
“Oh, you mean . . . ” Lauren broke off, pouted, puzzled. “You know, I’m not sure she told me her name. What do you want to know?”
“Where’s she staying?”
“Over at the Roosevelt. Doesn’t everyone?”
“She’s not. I checked. She’s not up at the Westwood Lodge either.”
“That’s a little bit stalkery, Reith.”
Lauren was not a friend and never a lover, but there was a tie between Reith and her; a thing of tattoos and piercings, dreads and hair coloring. Counter-culture was their mutual gravity.
“I’m just interested, that’s all.”
“Oh really.”
“Lauren, that’s not necessary.”
The doorbell clanged. Hunter from the Roosevelt came in for his caffeine hit before going back to losing money online. Reith had not noticed that the low cloud had become rain. His flannel shirt was soaked through in the few steps across the road. He shook his head, manically scraped water from his face and eyes.